Original Glazed Donuts. Fresh roasted coffee. Window of the conveyer belt of donuts. These signatures should remind you of the famous Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Krispy Kreme has always had a “krisp” and “klean” reputation with the soft sweet doughnuts usually bought in dozens, but a recent promotion in the United Kingdom has led to a controversial spotlight on the company.

Krispy Kreme UK newly promoted KKK Wednesday, which is an acronym for Krispy Kreme Klub Wednesday. This promotion, planned by one of the franchise owners, caused a stir after a store in Hull, England posted the event on the Facebook page. Unfortunately, KKK is widely known as an acronym for the infamous Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist hate group towards African Americans originally formed during the Reconstruction Era. After noticing the mistake, the Hull store promptly deleted the promotion from the page and released an apology from Krispy Kreme UK and company’s Winston Salem, N.C. headquarters. According to a spokeswoman, Lafeea Watsson, for Krispy Kreme, the franchisee will “take greater precautions with the publicity materials in the future” and have “wholeheartedly apologized to the customers” for the accident. The purpose of the advertisement was to occupy kids in the United Kingdom for a week while they were on school break from half-terms during a holiday. There was no intention or propaganda for the KKK to this incident as the preceding days were promoted as Funday Monday and Colouring Tuesday, which only show appealing, fun themes to the week. Calvin Taber (12) thinks the situation was misinterpreted and the marketing team just made a “silly mistake” because no “legitimate business would ever knowingly support the KKK.”

This controversial racial promotion has not only happened to Krispy Kreme but other big companies as well such as Popchips’ ad with Ashton Kutcher done in a brown face to resemble the Bollywood producer, Raj, and Cheerios’ ad with an interracial family of African American father, Caucasian mother, and mixed child.

This latest scandal to Krispy Kreme should not affect the pleasant image to the corporation. But while we’re on the topic of Krispy Kreme, its 1000^th doughnut shop opened on February 24, 2015 in Kansas City, Kansas and celebrated the great event by giving away one free Original Glazed doughnut to the first 1,000 guests at each of the 1,000 Krispy Kreme locations around the world.  Krispy Kreme was established in 1937 and continues to be our favorite doughnut shop (even with the blunder).